Head of UCL Computer Science wins medal

The head of UCL Computer Science has won a prestigious award for his outstanding contribution to engineering and technology.

Professor Anthony Finkelstein has been awarded the Oliver Lodge Medal by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).

He will receive the medal at an awards ceremony in the Pavilion at Lord’s Cricket Ground on 25 November.

In awarding the medal, the IET judging panel looks for outstanding and sustained excellence in one or more activities, for example, research and development, innovation, design, manufacturing, technical management, or the promotion of engineering and technology.

Professor Finkelstein has been a key figure in the field of ‘requirements engineering’ – a subdiscipline of software engineering that is concerned with determining the goals, functions and constraints of hardware and software systems.

He said: “It’s nice to be recognised by one’s colleagues in this way, and it’s great for UCL’s contribution to software engineering to be recognised by the computing community of which we are part.”

The award completes a hatrick of accolades for the department and Professor Finkelstein, who has been head of Computer Science for seven years.

In May, he won the UCL Advances Entrepreneurial Spirit Award 2009 in recognition of his willingness to engage with business in multiple ways that have enhanced the department’s core research and teaching activities.

And last year the department’s James Beattie (MEng Computer Science), a student whose project he supervised, won the 2008 Science, Engineering and Technology Microsoft Research Award for the Best Computational Science Student.

Professor Finkelstein, who is about to record a series of podcasts giving advice on research careers in computer science, added: “I’m proud of these three awards because one recognises activities in research, one is entrepreneurial and one is a tribute to the strength of the department’s teaching.”

The Oliver Lodge Medal is named after Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge (1841–1940), a UCL graduate who became an assistant professor of applied mathematics at the university, where he carried out pioneering work in the development of wireless telegraphy.

Image: right, Professor Anthony Finkelstein.

UCL context

UCL’s department of Computer Science is a world-class centre of excellence. Its work brings together novel technologies and methods in areas such as networks and communications; vision, imaging and virtual environments; intelligent systems; bioinformatics; and software systems engineering.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology is one of the world’s leading professional societies for the engineering and technology community. It provides a global knowledge network to facilitate the exchange of ideas and promote the positive role of science, engineering and technology in the world.